SynBioBeta Speaker
Jacob Glanville
Centivax
CEO
Jacob Glanville is a serial biotechnology entrepreneur, and value creator. He built and sold his first company Distributed Bio from founding in March of 2012 to a $104M dollar sale to Charles River Laboratories in December of 2020. During that period, he developed the core business model, grew and organized the research teams, and established the technology IP that enabled Distributed Bio to become profitable without investment and scale to 36 programs per year by the year of acquisition (beating Adimab in productivity). As part of the acquisition agreement, he founded Centivax Inc and spun-out his incubated IP for universal vaccines vaccines and broad-spectrum antibodies into Centivax, where he is now CEO. Prior to Distributed Bio, he was a Principal Scientist at Pfizer, where he developed multiple seminal methods in repertoire sequencing, synthetic antibody library design, for which he was awarded the 2010 Pfizer Achievement award. Prior to that, he worked at the Berkeley Phylogenomics Group, developing algorithms for analysis of rapidly evolving pathogens. Prior to that, he did some software development freelance work but also worked restaurant jobs in the service industry, interfacing with the public.Growing up watching his parents grow a successful hotel and restaurant business (La Posada de Santiago) in Guatemala in a Tzutujil village during a civil war, he was happy to find running a biotechnology startup to be similar in many respects, with many of the lessons learned in team management, product refinement, client recruitment and haggling to be surprisingly translatable. As a teenager, when his father became extremely ill in 1995-1996, he dropped out of highschool temporarily to run the business of 44 employees until his father recovered. From 2012-2019, he nurtured the vision of universal vaccines through the creation of a profitable business to support the work, the building of an animal facility in Guatemala to prove the technology, a collaboration with the University of San Carlos, supported an international research team over 4 years to prove the technology in-vivo, and managed to gather a team of remarkable scientists from USF, Pfizer, Genentech and other places who agreed to join and participate in manifesting the vision.
